Wallpaper Search

Let's use the latest features added to Google Image Search to find a beautiful wallpaper for your desktop.

1. Go to Google Image Search and click on "Advanced Image Search".

2. Enter your query in the first input box, for example: flower.

3. Select "photo content" from the list of content types.

4. Click on "Use my desktop size" to find images appropriate for your desktop.

5. Perform the search.

6. If you have a favorite color, click on "All colors" and pick one of the 12 options.

YouTube RealTime Sharing

YouTube has always been a social network, but the interactions between users are limited. Last year, YouTube started to broadcast activity streams and you could see on the homepage the latest videos uploaded by your friends, their latest comments and ratings.

To make the activity streams more useful, YouTube decided to expand the actions that are shared and to show them in a persistent toolbar at the bottom of the page. The feature, dubbed RealTime YouTube, requires an invitation from a friend who already has it.

The RealTime toolbar shows a list of friends that are currently online, their recent activities and notifies when one of your friends posts comments or rates videos. For example, you can now see all the videos currently watched by your friends.


The toolbar lacks some features that would make it really useful: chatting with your friends and watching videos at the same time. You can disable the real-time sharing and it's also possible to hide the toolbar from YouTube's settings.

If you already have the RealTime toolbar, you can send invitations to 25 of your friends. A simple way to both invite YouTube users to become your friends and to send an invitation for the toolbar is to use the YouTube Peeps link, which is only active for 15 minutes. To get an invitation, monitor the search results for youtube.com/peep on Twitter and click on a recent invite link.

Real-time interfaces become increasingly popular as people no longer want to wait for updates: Twitter's real-time search, FriendFeed's new interface and YouTube RealTime show what's happening right now.

"An overwhelming sense of restlessness and impatience engulfed the U.S. this week when citizens determined that everything — the morning commute, phone conversations, getting a table at Chili's, making coffee, commercial breaks, everything — was taking entirely too long," reported The Onion last month. "According to the latest time estimates, if everything continues to move along at this intolerable pace, Americans will be left with no other choice but to scream."

What's Popular Around the Web

Steve Rubel found a new gadget developed by Google that highlights popular content from the web. Much like Digg, Reddit or Yahoo Buzz, you can vote the web pages and add content you find interesting.


Here's how Google describes the "What's Popular" gadget:

The What's Popular gadget by Google helps you discover interesting items from all over the Internet.

How we find interesting stuff
What's Popular uses algorithms to find interesting content from a combination of your submissions and trends in aggregated user activity across a variety of Google services, like YouTube and Google Reader.

Ratings
You can rate items that you like or dislike by clicking the ratings buttons next to each item. If you change your mind, you can change your rating at anytime. The What's Popular gadget looks at what users liked or disliked to improve its ranking of interesting items.

Add a URL
Tell What's Popular about interesting items you have found! If they become popular, they may rise to the top of our list! You can submit an item with or without attribution to yourself and preview your submission before you post. If you decide to associate your username with your submission you'll be able to edit its title and description. The items you submitted can be found in the "My adds" area, where you can remove your name if you change your mind.

The gadget is a part of a service that will be released in Google Labs, where it's already hosted. Right now, the most popular web page has 13 pops (probably a name for upvotes), there are three categories: stories, videos, images and the pages are sorted by relevancy, the algorithm favoring recent content.

New Viewer for Gmail's PowerPoint Attachments

Gmail replaced the Flash-based PowerPoint viewer released in 2007 with the same viewer used for PDF files. Some of the features that were available in the old viewer are missing: you can no longer view the presentation as a slideshow or read the titles to easily find a slide.

"This viewer provides a richer set of features than the old "View as slideshow" version: you can zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and "print" the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, we no longer require you to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser," explains Gmail's blog.


The same viewer is also used for TIFF attachments, which can store one or more images. "The TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition applications." As you probably noticed, browsers usually don't support this format, so you need a plug-in to view TIFF files. Google's viewer works by converting the files to PNG images.

Try the new feature by finding Gmail messages that have PPT or TIFF attachments and clicking on "View" next to one of the attachments.

Fewer Limitations for Google Docs PDFs

Until now, when you uploaded PDF files to Google Docs, the viewer displayed only the first 100 pages. The limitation has been removed and you can now upload longer documents, as long as the size is less than 10 MB. Another change is that you can upload more than 100 PDFs, but it's not clear what's the new upper bound.


The viewer is used when you upload PDF files in Google Docs or when you click on a PDF attachment in Gmail. It works by converting the pages to PNG images and it has advanced features like zoom, search and text selection.

Tip: to copy text from a PDF, highlight the text and press Ctrl+C.

{ Thanks, Camdef. }

Google Video Updates the Interface

Google Video removed the ability to upload videos and it's now just a video search engine. Even if YouTube is a better place to build an audience that watches your videos, Google Video had its unique appeal and it was a great service for uploading long-form videos.

Another change is that Google Video updated the design for the search results pages and change the TV view mode to look more like the standard result pages for web search. The video player is much smaller and the results dominate the page, making you wonder why Google still calls the interface "TV view". Below the small video player, there's a filmstrip that lets jump to different parts of the video, a list of related videos and an option to email the video.


The new interface has a lot of flaws: the video player moves as you scroll down, the list of related videos is not always visible, Google Video no longer displays ratings and there's a lot of unused space.

I hope the service will manage to find its identity, because Google Video is Google's service that had the most structural changes: from trying to index the captions for TV shows to hosting videos, from a video store to a business tool and a video search engine.

Here's one of the first viral videos uploaded to Google Video, back in 2005, when Back Dorm Boys became famous for lip syncing to Backstreet Boys songs:


Related:
A brief history of Google Video

Filter YouTube Comments

The comments posted on YouTube are rarely interesting and it's usually a good idea to just ignore them. YouTube tried different ways to filter the noise: adding an option to mark comments as spam, voting comments, previewing comments before posting them, but the results aren't that great.

There's even a Firefox extension that hides "undesirable" comments because they include too many spelling mistakes, excessive punctuation or profanity. "I was so tired of comments by the ignorant, prejudiced, hate mongering, 10-year-old-seeming dip!@#s who obviously have no life and flock to YouTube to spread their disease, that I started avoiding the site all together. Despite my best attempts to ignore the comments I always seemed to glance down, get pulled in to reading them, and be delighted with the wonderful reflection of humanity that it is," says a user of the YouTube Comment Snob extension.

For those that don't want to install the extension, YouTube added some advanced options for comments. You can now hide the comments that include "coarse language and racial slurs" or hide all the comments. Just click on "Options" next to "Text comments" and filter the comments.


According to ArsTechnica, this is just one of the many initiatives "designed to give users and families greater control to moderate their YouTube experience".

API for Google Analytics

One of the few missing features from Google Analytics was the ability to access data programmatically. Now you can create application that use data from Google Analytics using the Data Export API.

"With the Google Analytics Data Export API, you can develop client applications that download Analytics data in the form of Google Data API feeds. Your client application can use the Data Export API to request data from an existing Analytics profile for an authorized user, and refine the results of the request using query parameters. Currently, the Data Export API supports read-only access to your Google Analytics data."

The API is useful to create different interfaces for Google Analytics and to process the data in interesting ways. For example, you might build a notifier that alerts you when your site has a large number of visitors or you could use the data to display a list of popular posts from your blog.

There are already some interesting applications that use the API, including a dashboard that integrates data from Google Analytics, a SEO tool that analyzes the keywords used to find the site, a mobile interface for Google Analytics and an AIR application.


"The Data Export API is easy to use and provides read-only access to all your Analytics data. Any data that's available through the standard Analytics web interface is available through the API. The Analytics API is a Google Data API. This is the same API protocol for Google Calendar, Finance and Webmaster Tools," mentions the Analytics blog.

If you don't think this news is very exciting, you should become a trusted tester for Google Analytics to try other cool features before they're publicly available. "Current Trusted Testers have recently tried out such features as: Event Tracking, Data Sharing, and Outbound Links."

Google People Search

Google's search results now include a special section for Google Profiles at the bottom of the page. If you search for a name like Jon Wiley, Google will show a list of the top results from Google Profile Search, followed by links to some popular social networks: MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.



If you checked "Display my full name so I can be found in search", your profile will be included in the search results. "If you want your profile to appear in Google search results, make sure you've selected to display your full name on the Edit profile page. Adding more information will help you improve your profile's rank," explains Google.

Here are some other tips to improve your ranking in Google's people search engine:

* link to the profile from other sites
* verify your name
* include a photo and enough details about yourself

A quick way to access your profile is to search for [me], but you can also go to http://www.google.com/profiles or click on "My account" and select "Edit profile".

It's worth pointing out that you need to explicitly create a public profile and the profile is not included in the search results without your permission.


{ via Google Blog }

YouTube's Featured Search Results

YouTube started to display videos from partners at the top of the search results and in the right sidebar. For some reason, YouTube likes to call these videos "featured videos". According to the help center, "featured videos will be primarily populated with videos from YouTube's thousands of partners, but might also include select user videos that are currently popular or that we have previously showcased in Spotlight Videos. (...) Featured videos are not advertisements or paid placements, but do feature content from partners with whom we have a commercial relationship."

I think the terminology is misleading and it should've been replaced with something more explanatory like "videos from YouTube partners". And just because the videos are from YouTube partners, it doesn't mean they're more relevant than the "organic" results. YouTube's parent company doesn't have a special section in the search results for websites from Google's content network.


Besides earning revenue from advertising and being promoted on every YouTube page, partners have many other privileges: they can upload custom thumbnails, create branded channels and offer downloadable videos.

Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline is the second new services released today in Google Labs. According to Google, it's "a web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline."

The search box is very powerful, but you first need to pick a category from the drop-down. Google lets you add different sources: blogs, newspapers and it shows structured information from Wikipedia and Freebase.

Here's a simple way to visualize the list of posts from two Google-related blogs:


Using data aggregated by Freebase, Google can show some famous paintings by Claude Monet:


You can create interesting timelines using this services and it would be nice to save them or to have a permalink for future reference. Hopefully, the service will also add the option to use custom data sources.

Google Similar Images

Google Similar Images is an experimental service from Google Labs that lets you find images that are similar with an image you select.

"Similar Images allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. Click the Similar images link under an image to find other images that look like it."



The interface doesn't perform real-time image analysis, so you can't upload images. Instead, Google lets you search the web for images, choose one of the results and click on "Similar images". The results are surprisingly good and this is probably the most impressive feature ever released by Google Image Search.



Google also launched a new interface for Google Labs that categorizes the experiments, lets you sort the services by popularity, post comments and subscribe to a feed of the most recent services.

Chromium Updater

If you use Chromium, the open source project behind Google Chrome, you probably noticed that the browser doesn't include an auto-update feature. For those who don't want to manually install the latest Chromium snapshot, there's Chromium Updater, an unofficial application that downloads and installs the latest Chromium version. Chromium Updater doesn't run automatically, so you still need to launch the software periodically.


Installing Chromium brings you the latest features and fixes, but the builds are usually less stable than Google Chrome's releases. A safer option is to install the early access release channels for Google Chrome, which include support for auto-update. "Subscribing to the Beta or Dev channel means you'll get more frequent (but less stable) updates and you'll get to try new features first."